Entrepreneurship Thoughts

I have been working with 2 CMU students on creating a startup as part of the NSF I-Corps program since early September (which provides some funding for startups). We went through several ideations (brainstorm on ideas) and customer discovery interviews (and switched topic completely).

Our first idea was to build a brain-computer interface (BCI) that would allow users to remotely control devices. The BCI should be non-invasive, affordable, and convenient (portable). This is not a new idea, as a lot of recent startups have been working on it (most notably NextMind). Our value proposition was to focus on everyday situations when our hands + voice control are unavailable. Hence, we named this startup, “Third Hand.”

I still think that the idea is great and believe that in the future we would have BCI as a service and perhaps as ubiquitous as cellphones. The main challenge (and reason why we gave up) was the lack of technology and expertise. No one in our team has the experience building a BCI hardware (althought I have experience analyzing brain signals), and we do not want to be dependent on APIs provided by existing BCIs.

Still, I learned a lot working on this idea. Here’s a list of what I found most important:

• Success of a startup depends highly on the team (working well together is paramount). One of my team members has a lot of experience doing it and actually setup a lot of team building exercises to help us know each other more.
• Customer discovery needs to be done constantly, especially at the start. We need to first figure out the customers’ problems, and our technology needs to provide the solutions to those problems. We followed a short book called Talking to Humans that goes more in-depth into the process. It’s very long process that consumed most of our time that we put into this. It is extremely helpful.
• There are a lot of resources for market research/competitor analysis/value proposition (customer discovery is also very helpful for this).

We are currently working on our 2nd idea (we actually came up with like 20 ideas), social media + map-based travel planner. I think again this is a great idea, but extremely crowded pre-COVID and more difficult now due to COVID-19. I’m optimistic but realistic about this idea. In the worst case, I will learn a lot.

I will make a few more posts about our 2nd idea, team, and customer discovery interview results, depending on how they go.